Marc Benioff wrote and sold his first software at 15 and joined Oracle straight out of USC, where he became its youngest vice president by 26 and a protege of Larry Ellison. After more than a decade he took a sabbatical that reset his ambition.
In 1999 he founded Salesforce on a deceptively simple thesis: enterprise software should be delivered over the internet and rented by the seat, not installed and owned. He wrapped it in an aggressive "No Software" marketing campaign, complete with a logo of the word software in a red circle with a slash through it.
Benioff did not invent the idea of hosted software, but he authored the category language that the entire SaaS industry still uses, and built the playbook for selling it. He remains Chair and CEO.
"The only constant in the technology industry is change."